If you have always wanted to know what neural networks are all about then you only need to spend some time watching this video.

The video is titled Developing Neural Networks using Visual Studio, but Visual Studio seems to be in the title because it was given by a Microsoft Research person at Build 2013.

You need to be warned that the video is 1 hour and 20 minutes long- yes that long! (There are 20 minutes of questions and answers at the end.)

It also has some idiosyncratic views, and if you are an expert don't expect to agree with everything that is said. There are also some big omissions, such as the idea of an autoencoder, Boltzmann network pretraining, and so on - but this is supposed to be an introduction. There are also a few examples of real software learning; real, well demonstration, data; and discussion of the commercial possibilities.

You can also download the code used in the talk and for this having a copy of Visual Studio is a good idea.

Big, or deep, neural networks is the current hot topic in AI and it is a big jump from the sorts of networks that are described in this talk to the billion neuronal connection networks used to do the amazing things like image recognition, speech recognition and translation.

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